South Dakota’s Custom Enterprise System to Increase Wildlife Management

If you ask a sportsman where you can find the best pheasant hunting spots, odds are they will say South Dakota. This reputation is well earned, and the Game, Fish and Parks Department (GFP) in South Dakota takes pride in cultivating the right habitat, environment, and practices to support its bountiful bird population.

The Wildlife Division currently owns and manages over 281,000 acres of Game Production and Water Access Areas (GPAs) across South Dakota. These publically accessible areas are carefully managed to benefit all types of wildlife. Achieving management goals and objectives on these areas requires maintaining large quantities of information.

The Wildlife Inventory and Land Management Application (WILMA) is a web-based application allowing habitat managers to map, track, and report various land management activities on GPAs throughout the State. WILMA is also a repository of important GPA information, such as purchase information, legal descriptions, support documents and photos, lease or easement information, and various historic documents.

GPA search page

WILMA users create management plans for GPAs, relying heavily on a mapping system using GIS data such as habitat inventory, planned management projects, and completed management projects. WILMA provides users with various reports detailing management plan information, project planning and accomplishment summaries, and more. The system allows administrators to create, edit, and remove users, edit look-up tables, and other functions. Users are grouped by roles which provides appropriate access within the application.

Project page.

In partnership with Timmons Group, the Wildlife Division recently redesigned WILMA using modern technology and mapping tools. Throughout the rewrite, careful attention was paid to simplifying workflows. Redundant or confusing data was condensed and the map experience was reimagined to guide the user step-by-step through their process. Released in January 2016, WILMA 2.0 is expected to reduce the amount of time and headache entering data, and will pave the way for mobile data collection in the field.

Map page

Timmons Group is proud to announce this release, and was privileged to partner with the Department of Game, Fish and Parks of South Dakota in the effort. Paul Coughlin, GFP’s Wildlife Habitat Program Administer commented, “Technology will be forever advancing. Due to the efficiency of WILMA 2.0 and the increasing amount of information that we are charged with maintaining, we look forward to further enhancing this custom solution in the future to gather and maintain wildlife and land data.”

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